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FtM or MtF transgenderism? These are meaningfully different things.
That study didn’t separate the two. IMO anime and similar media plays a role in causing MTF, I have no idea what causes FTM though
It's almost certainly more porn than anime, but you obviously can't bring up porn when coming out to your parents.
Unless you're Andrea Long Chu maybe.
Judging by the sheer quantity of anime avatars I see among the online trans, I rrally think it's the anime. I've personally witnessed the anime -> furry -> trans pipeline, but have never heard of porn being a major part of anyone's trans origin story.
Not that I necessarily think it's the anime itself that does it (though a genre where nearly all men look like ladyboy twinks and nearly all women look like 13 year old schoolgirls can't be particularly healthy for a developing sexuality). It's that anime as a subculture attracts a lot of mentally ill weirdos.
I'm inclined to think that there's some further underlying factor that explains the trans + anime connection, rather than a specifically anime -> trans pipeline (and maybe that underlying factor is just "autism").
I unfortunately can't serve as a perfectly controlled experiment, because I was exposed to anime from an extremely young age. But I was having persistent thoughts about wanting to be a woman by the time I was around 10 years old, and prior to that time, I had only been exposed to what I would consider to be very "normal" mainstream children's anime with pretty normal male role models, like Pokemon and Yugioh and DBZ (Cardcaptor Sakura got shuffled in there too, but, I would be shocked if one show with a female protagonist had such a profound lifelong impact on my psychology).
All three of these media franchises contain, as a central part of the protagonist’s path toward their desired social rewards, a magical identity transformation:
Yugi learns that his true identity is an extraordinary Pharaoh, and that this real identity was lurking within his body and waiting to appear after some puzzling around
Pokémon have their identities changed in a powerful and stunning way; Charmeleon, Butterfree, from egg to eggmazing
Goku shifts into a Saiyan which changes his fundamental identity into something cosmically-important
What is unconsciously grafted into the adolescent’s understanding of the world is that such magical identity transformations are normal and extremely desirable. They are sensed as “reinforcing” in that they occur at key junctions where a character obtains something highly desirable, and where he is otherwise in a stressed or confused state. We can imagine an idea being unconsciously smuggled into the mind: “what if I have my own shocking identity transformation which results in the social rewards I have been pining for? Doesn’t everyone have one of these?”
Where effeminate anime comes in, is that across many anime franchises the female characters are the most “privileged” and anxiolytic within the cast, and usually the most beautiful to boot. Imagine you’re a youth who, as @Botond173 and @4bpp suggest, has a lot of stress related to their gender and social identity. Your favorite activity to reduce stress is to vicariously live another life (essentially inhabiting the body of a new person), and the person you are vicariously experiencing often has a magical identity transformation that drastically improves his life. What’s more, the most comforting / anxiolytic / socially-desired objects in the animeverse are women. Often these women, or girls, are overly-feminine. You’ve essentially been primed to vicariously inhabit another life as relaxation, you’ve been conditioned to associate the highly-feminine with the most comfort, and you’ve been conditioned to expect an identity change to fundamentally flip your life for the better. Now, maybe still, for a lot of people this doesn’t do anything. But let’s say you are wired a little differently, autism or etc. And then on top of this, there are communities that are now ready to shower you in superabundant social praise and validation for your identity transformation, and even the media seems to be on your side, and there are psychological tricks that this community employs purposefully or inadvertently (look at how colorful you will be now; so much novelty; you’re part of a tribe and get a flag and grievances and purpose and . . . ).
Re: the porn element mentioned by @Tanista, one of the ferishes that seem to be far more common among MtFs is “puppygirl” et al. This is essentially the fantasy that you are so socially-desirable that someone wants to command you around all day as a pet, while at the same time providing a comforting identity through the outsourcing of control over your life. I think this is similar to the anime etiology in that there is an identity change which comes with a huge shift in social esteem.
There is some relevant data for this theory, eg the HomeStuck fandom is 50% transgender (100x prevalence?) and the media franchise is essentially (1) I had a fundamental life-altering identity transformation through logging into a digital social ecosystem [sburb]; (2) the coolest and most beautiful and less stressful characters are all women.
A bit reductive, no? The pharaoh is an entirely different person, that Yugi needs to let go of in order to realize his own growth. And Goku changes to become more masculine. Stronger, faster, angrier yet simultaneously in control of himself. He doesn't become something else. He enchances what he already has. In Pokemon, the main characters do not evolve because that is clearly impossible. That kind of transformation is limited to a different species than us.
Sure but I think this is just a co-factor that didn’t exist in the past. The pharaoh is a whole other identity co-inhabiting Yugi’s body. Goku becomes more masculine, but the Saiyans are a totally different race that Goku realizes he truly is; it’s over 9000% different than just being a normal human. Ash doesn’t evolve, that’s true, but the Pokémon have kind of human-ish personalities; people love to cosplay them.
There are two different ideas here, dualism and power-level / level of divinity (to connect it to ancient religious ideas better, for example creator deity, Olympian, lower god, demi-god, angel, demon, mythical creature, etc.). Dualism is not the same thing as divinity or level-of-divinity. It's not really the dualism that is the issue, the beings are depicted as having stable qualities of soul that are revealed rather easily. Rather it's the power-level problem that invokes envy in people, beings that are much better than a human are depicted freely in anime. This happens a lot less in Western media, it's mainly superheroes and even then only Superman who is an alien. Many superheroes are just men who gain some kind of power from technology or a bestower, like Iron Man, Batman, and Spider man.
This could make someone value their own life less but I don't see how it could make them think they can be the opposite sex.
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